Commercial Finance Business Partner

About the Role

The Commercial Finance Business Partner serves as a trusted strategic advisor to the leadership team, providing commercial and financial insight, objective challenge, and enterprise-wide perspective to drive growth, investment, improve operational decision quality and strengthen execution.

Responsibilities

• Identifies growth opportunities and performance improvement priorities, leveraging knowledge, talent and proven practices across Crane.


• Advises leadership in prioritising opportunities, resources and investments based on strategic fit, probability of success, risk-adjusted return, cash profile and organisational capacity.


• Translates strategic objectives into measurable business outcomes through adherence to strategic planning, annual operating plans, forecasts, resource allocation, and performance management processes.


• Leads a robust commercial operating cadence across pipeline, orders, backlog, revenue, margin, working capital, cash, and profitability, ensuring accountability for commitments and corrective actions.


• Drives forecasting excellence by maintaining integrated pipeline-to-cash visibility, improving forecast accuracy, reconciling commercial and financial views, and proactively managing risks and opportunities.


• Partners with Sales leadership to strengthen pipeline quality, opportunity qualification, funnel discipline, conversion rates, and forecasting performance while accelerating commercial responsiveness.


• Evaluates and provides advice regarding major bids, tenders, contracts, renewals, and investment opportunities through rigorous financial analysis, business case development, risk assessment, and governance processes.


• Develops actionable market, customer, product, and competitor insights to identify growth opportunities, improve commercial performance, and support strategic decision-making.


• Leads pricing and profitability initiatives by promoting value-based pricing, improving pricing discipline, optimizing customer and product mix, and identifying opportunities to enhance margins and value capture.


• Conducts customer, contract, product, channel, and portfolio profitability analyses to support strategic account planning, renewals, expansion opportunities, and long-term profitable growth.


• Partners cross-functionally with Sales, Marketing, Product, Commercial Excellence, Operations, and Finance teams to align priorities, remove barriers, and execute commercial growth initiatives.


• Drives cash generation and working capital performance by evaluating contract structures, milestone billing, collection risks, revenue recognition dependencies, and cash conversion opportunities.


• Establish reliable commercial and financial reporting, analytics, and governance processes by improving data quality, system integration, performance visibility, reporting automation, and organizational decision-making capabilities.

Required Skills

The ideal candidate will have the following experience:

• Significant experience in commercial finance, strategic finance, business partnering, deal support or growth-oriented finance leadership.


• Proven ability to partner effectively with senior Sales, General Management and business leadership stakeholders.


• Strong financial modelling, forecasting, pricing, profitability and scenario-planning capability.


• Experience translating commercial pipelines and backlog into credible revenue, margin and cash forecasts.


• Experience supporting complex solution sales, long sales-cycle businesses, tenders, government programmes or major contracts.


• Demonstrated ability to identify risks and opportunities early and convert analysis into practical countermeasures.


• Experience assessing complex contracts, including milestone structures, payment terms, delivery dependencies and risk allocation.


• Strong understanding of working capital, cash conversion and the financial implications of commercial terms.


• Ability to challenge constructively, exercise independent judgement and influence decisions without direct authority.


• Ability to operate effectively across multiple countries, cultures and functions in a matrix organisation.


• Excellent communication skills, executive presence, integrity and professional judgement.


• Evidence of improving business outcomes, rather than solely producing analysis or reporting.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in government solutions, authentication, secure identity, technology, software, Track & Trace or another regulated sector preferred.


• Exposure to public-sector procurement, bid governance and complex contract negotiations preferred.


• Experience applying a structured business operating system, continuous-improvement methodology or growth framework to improve commercial execution and performance preferred.